Up In The Hills

This morning I tackled my first mountain ride and when I say mountain, I don’t mean L’Alp d’Huez caliber. I don’t mean the kind of ridiculously difficult nonsense guys like Lance Armstrong seem to enjoy riding every Sunday afternoon. Since I’m still getting my lungs back after ten years of smoking (oof--ten years?), let’s be as upfront about that as possible. Rather than pack my bike in a box and fly eight hours to pointy mountain ranges throughout France, I packed my bike in the back of my pick-up truck and spent two hours driving to New Paltz located in wonderful upstate New York.

One of the things about riding in the mountains is the expectations. Of course, I’ve spent the past two months kicking my ass in Central and Prospect Parks, and while both those spots are great for training, the hills don’t go on and on the way the hills go on and on in the Catskills and Adirondacks. With that said, I was halfway over the George Washington Bridge wondering, “Just how freaking long will I be able to ride those freaking hills up there before I either (a) quit, or (b) die?”

Two hours later, I found out.

New Paltz would be a quaint town if not for the fact that it’s host to a SUNY school, which means lots of confused college kids wearing a lot of tie-dye t-shirts, overgrown beards, black-framed eyeglasses that were cool five years ago in Soho, and psuedo-intellectual attitudes that seem to go nowhere fast. Regardless, just outside New Paltz sits a mountain area that is home to some fantastic rock climbing as well as a small yet intriguing park called Lake Minnewaska. I chose this particular locale considering I’m already familiar with the roads but, more importantly, the route that leads out of New Paltz into the mountains is long and severely uphill, so I figured, “I’ll deal with the two-hour drive and see what I can do for the day.”

Long and uphill is exactly what it was. Actually, I may be exaggerating a bit. While I don’t recall the numbers of the exact routes I traveled today, the ride does become very uphill once you make a right at the stop sign and begin climbing the road that leads directly to Lake Minnewaska, my primary destination. Was it long? A few miles, at best, but a few miles of incessant hill climbing is a lot more than what I’m used to here in Brooklyn and Manhattan.

I’m not going to lie. Even with the gearing set to the easiest possible combination (and I have three sprockets up front) I had to stop three times before I reached Lake Minnewaska--three freaking times. If I had been wearing a heart rate monitor, I have no doubt the screen would have read: “Are you nuts? What the hell are you trying to prove? STOP PEDALING!”

Although now that I’ve done it, I can say it’s a hell of a lot easier going down than it is going up. That’s obvious, of course, but once you’re on the other side (or turned around, which is what I did), it’s amazing how quickly the brain forgets about the pain you just went through to reach the summit.

And I hit 37 miles-per-hour on the way down without pedaling. Does that, in any way, speak to the steepness of the hill going up? I’m not being a wiseass--just asking.

Heading back toward the parking lot where I had left my truck, I decided to explore some of the side streets near the village limits and discovered some pleasant, rolling roads that cut through the flats just south of Lake Minnewaska. After 25 miles, I returned to the truck to fill up on water, take a short breather, and then explore some more. On the road leading to Lake Mohonk, I decided to bear to the right when everybody else took a left (to get to Mohonk) and found an extremely long and flat street which allowed me to cruise at 17 miles-per-hour even with a headwind.

Finally, once my ass felt completely numb, I turned around and started back to the truck for the last time. Once I pulled it in, I was out of water and the trip odometer read 40.07. Next week, I want more hills (or more flats at a higher pace) so I can show off my new Corona jersey. I invested in that sucker Friday afternoon and now that I now the pleasures of riding in a real cycling jersey, I don’t think I’m going back to t-shirts any time soon.

Peace.